so a friend of mine sent me a tweet. it looked like this: twitter.com/_/status/xxxxxxxxxxxx9280000
and the conversation went like this:
lexi: damn that tweet has a lot of trailing zeroes
[Replying to lexi: damn that tweet has a lot of trailing zeroes]
lexi: oh no
lexi: oh god oh fuck
if you're a math nerd you can probably guess where this is going. if not, please watch But how does bitcoin actually work? by 3b1b
but yeah.
you can build a centralized proof-of-work blockchain on twitter.
not linking it to twitter in some form, but actually running the fucking blockchain on twitters infrastructure by using tweets as blocks and tweeting as mining. i am not fucking joking
instead of using sha256 hashes you can use the much more eco-friendly twitter backend. it wouldn't require proof of GPU work, but proof of time (and proof of credentials) because the api is rate limited and fuck twitter, i dont pay the server bills lol
the proof is super simple: your tweets get an ID. and ~22 of those bits are more or less out of your control (worker ID and sequence number). you get n trailing zeroes, you get the block. you could also introduce threads [as in chained twitter replies by one person, not cpu workloads] to exponentially increase the necessary work if more than like 1k people mine on twitter, so even some bad RNG isnt a problem here.
you can link to previous blocks by literally just linking to another tweet. and you could automatically backup all successfully mined blocks on an internet archive (wouldnt cost them a lot of bandwidth bc only a tiny fraction of all tweets need to get archived) and you literally have a stable (but more or less centralized) blockchain.
you could genuinely just rip off most of the original bitcoin implementation and implement it with twitter as the underlying blockchain infrastructure.
this is so incredibly cursed. i should not be allowed to be on the internet
This is comically cursed.
...in theory, could you do this with any system that has postID built out like Twitter's? Could we blockchain Discord messages? Run a cryptocurrency on Slack? What are the limits here?
basically, tweet ids have several components. timestamp, instance, and sequence.
these fit in differently-sized parts of the ID:
- timestamp: 41 bits
- instance: 10 bits
- sequence: 12 bits
so for a tweet id ending in four zeroes, you'd need a specific value for the last 2^14 bits (since 2^14 = 16384, and assuming my math + logic's correct)
this depends on various factors, though, and lunch break's over, so I'm not going to do this math right now
